“Wall Street 2,” “The Social Network” and “the Hurt Locker”

I recently watched Wall Street II: Money Never Sleeps, which was enjoyable but unsatisfying. It immediately made me think of two other films: the Social Network and the Hurt Locker. What do all three of these films have in common? you ask… Well, they all try to tackle “important” and “timely” subjects and all fail pretty bad at it. Each movie simplifies things in misleading ways and uses their subject matter to feign importance though each film really uses the same archetypes and plot arches that we have seen many times before. I was wondering if these failures speak more to film as an inadequate medium or about where American film is at right now. 

The Social Network is kind of the odd one out as it doesn’t address a subject as weighted as war or financial class — like the other two. It does have an interesting,
and relatively unexplored subject matter, which is Silicon Valley. Though this film tries to be more about Facebook the company than about Silicon Valley, whereas I see Facebook less as an completely unique juggernaut than as a Silicon Valley success story. (Myspace and Friendster got to the scene of this
“revolutionary idea” before Facebook… Facebook just made a few key tweaks and did an overall better job). It turns a story of a monster success in a new, uncharted and exciting industry into same old tale of an individual’s rise complete with the class hang-ups and personal betrayals. It’s a morality tale that, besides already been heard tons of times before, is too easy. To explain the main plot twist, they rely on tired concepts and archetypes of “evil” when the reality of the situation was most definitely much more complex — and INTERESTING! — than that. (I wrote a review of the movie, which elaborates more on these flaws). 

The Hurt Locker was the worst of these films in regards to approaching the subject matter in a meaningful way. Sure it did a great and unbending job of portraying the uber-macho, drunken psyche of military culture. But it’s main focus was about an
adrenaline junkie whose gets off on war. When the main character walks away in the final shot, I remember thinking to myself “Wow, is that it?” It really had nothing to offer about the moral questions of war or the unique and new moral questions raised by the most recent Iraq war. There are a few interesting parts, but they all get consumed in this larger adrenaline-junkie focus. First there is the therapist whose positive philosophizing is severely disconnected from the reality of war — and therefore inefficient in helping his patients. This part is great, but then (SPOILER ALERT) he volunteers to go into the field with his patient and gets blown up. Point made. But we never see how his patient reacts to this or addresses his problems. There is also the connection between the main character, William, and the young Iraqi who sells bootlegged Dvds. The connection is poignant especially when William mistakenly believes that this boy is killed. But this storyline is more in the service of showing the human side of adrenaline-addict William than in exploring how American soldiers relate to the Iraqi civilian population. This film could have been made, with some significant changes on the service, about any country or military in armed conflict. The insights it offered into the Iraqi war were minimal at best.*

I will say that the Hurt Locker was the best made of the three films, and that it was the one that didn’t concentrate on being a “zeitgeist” film. Maybe my qualms were more with how the movie was received and marketed than with how it was made. 
I will also just say, briefly, that I found it really confusing that both of these movies were critically acclaimed. I’ll leave it there.  

I thought Wall Street II did the best of these three in regards to leaving the audience with a better understanding of a problem/subject than if they had never seen the film. Most of this had to do with fast-paced dialogue. It didn’t do as good of a job as its predecessor at showing Wall Street for what it really is, but this was because it was centered around good-natured people. But this was also the problem. It was trying to be a love story that was also a historical rendering of the 2008 financial collapse and ensuing bailout. There were clear good guys and bad guys, when what made the first Wall Street so great was the moral ambiguity… personified in Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox. In the new movie, Michael Douglas had a few great bits on the state of the American financial industry, but these were only bits of dialogue that filled in pauses in a typical family drama. Stone did a good job of showing the hypocrisy of Wall Street bankers continuously complain about government regulation and then go to the government on their knees asking for a bailout — I thought that was the best part of the movie, and made the whole thing worth it.

But again the movie ends on an easy morality tale as the bad guy gets caught betting on a stock with his own private Cayman Island-based fund. All the observations and insights Gecko reveals in his rants are the things you could pick up from any article about the financial crisis you could find in any major magazine — excluding Time and Newsweek, of course. Plus, it is all told and not shown. (This is, from what I can gather from talking to MFA-types, is a cardinal sin of storytelling). And what is shown could be shown at any other time in history. 
This New York Times article about Wall Street II/interview with Oliver Stone is pretty interesting. Here is what the writer has to say about his reaction to the film, and Stone’s reaction to his reaction: 

THERE is something a little incongruous about hearing Oliver Stone, the left-leaning, blunt-talking film director, dropping arcane Wall Street terms like “credit default swaps” and “collateralized debt obligations.” But that’s just what he was doing a few weeks ago when trying to explain why his new movie, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” was not the fictionalized version of the financial crisis of 2008 I had expected… “I don’t know how you show a credit default swap on the screen,” Mr. Stone said. Never mind that the financial crisis was what had prompted his involvement in the first place. Or that the feelings of outrage and fear that the crisis fueled are feelings that Mr. Stone seems to share. Or that his many fans were surely expecting — like me — a movie that took on the financial crisis and eviscerated the folks responsible…It just couldn’t be done, Mr. Stone said, not in a mainstream movie. “The idea that the entire system was dependent on a credit bubble that could pop overnight — that is really hard to convey on-screen.”

That’s pretty fascinating. Either Stone is saying that film is an imperfect medium and one that cannot be properly asked to address the big subjects of our time, or that audiences don’t want hear about the big subjects of our time — or at least go to the movie theater to hear about the big subjects of our time — or he is saying that he cares more about money than making art. My assumption that the real explanation for the un-seriousness of this movie is somewhere near where these three/four reasons intersect. 

All of these movies try to be timely, but you could change most of the costumes, lingo and settings around and conceivably could have been made/could have been set 15 years ago… or 50 years ago for that matter.** They all seemed pre-thought out and packaged in way to give the audience the right amount of timeliness, sense of importance and… easy answers. That is to say they tell the audience what they want to hear… which is also to say that they all seem more invested in making money than telling the truth.

I think art can be whatever it wants to be, including a profitable venture whose m.o. is to entertain rather than engage the viewer. It’s just sad to see large American films, which are probably more prominent and consumed than any other art form in America, be so decidedly on that side of the fence.  

*Here’s an article by a veteran of the Iraqi conflict who says that the film is so unrealistic that it borders on disrespectful. 

** There is only a little bit of truth in the maxim that history repeats itself. I think each of these individual subjects have given rise to their own complexities and problems that have not been addressed before… which is why the failure to address these new questions is a failure to see these subjects for what they truly are.